Lucas123 writes "A researcher who built a car slightly larger than a strand of DNA won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for experimental nanotechnology. James Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice Univ. built a car only 4 nanometers in width in order to demonstrate that nanovehicles could be controlled enough to deliver payloads to build larger objects, such as memory chips and, someday, even buildings, like a self-assembling machine. Tour and a team of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers constructed a car with chassis, working suspension, wheels and a motor. 'You shine light on it and the motor spins in one direction and pushes the car like a paddle wheel on the surface,' Tour said. The team also built a truck that can carry a payload."

dlc3007 writes to mention an article in the New York Times discussing data privacy. The article expands on the U.S. Government's 'request' last Friday at a meeting between Robert S. Mueller III, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, and the executives of several Internet Service Providers. The ISPs were required to retain data on users, for trials if subpoenaed. Right now they're asking companies to do this. The threat is that, if they don't comply, legislation will follow. From the article: "The Justice Department is not asking the Internet companies to give it data about users, but rather to retain information that could be subpoenaed through existing laws and procedures, Mr. Roehrkasse said. While initial proposals were vague, executives from companies that attended the meeting said they gathered that the department was interested in records that would allow them to identify which individuals visited certain Web sites and possibly conducted searches using certain terms." We originally covered this last Sunday, but more details have been released on the meeting since then.

madman writes "In the light of the recent changes in the search war, like the Google/Dell partnership and eBay/Yahoo! alliance, Microsoft is facing a complicated question: Who are they going to ally with? Will they try to face the competition alone?"

SpaceAdmiral writes "Since the implementation of the Montreal Protocol, which limited ozone-destroying gasses like CFCs, the Earth's ozone layer has been recovering. However, new studies show that the ozone in the lower stratosphere is actually recovering faster than the Montreal Protocol alone can explain." From the article: "It's a complicated question. CFCs are not the only things that can influence the ozone layer; sunspots, volcanoes and weather also play a role. Ultraviolet rays from sunspots boost the ozone layer, while sulfurous gases emitted by some volcanoes can weaken it. Cold air in the stratosphere can either weaken or boost the ozone layer, depending on altitude and latitude. These processes and others are laid out in a review just published in the May 4th issue of Nature: 'The search for signs of recovery of the ozone layer' by Elizabeth Westhead and Signe Andersen."

kjh1 writes "Wired is running an article on RFID hacking that has potentially scary implications. Many RFID tags have no encryption and will happily transmit their information in the clear if they are active or within range of a reader. Worse yet is that they can be overwritten. Some interesting scenarios and experiments: snagging the code off of a security badge and replaying it to gain access to a secure building; vandalizing library contents by wiping or changing tags on books; changing the prices of items in a grocery or other store; and getting free gas by tweaking the ExxonMobil SpeedPass tags."

Guinnessy writes "Jason Tomczak, who is mentioned as the lead to the iPod Nano 'Scratch' Class Action law suit filed against Apple computers has published an open letter to the mac community. In it he claims that he never asked to be represented by David P. Meyer & Associates or Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, the lawyers in the case. He spoke to them once by phone about his scratched iPod case and asked that his name not be used. In fact, the two firms agree there is no signed document proving that Tomczak asked for representation. However, because Tomczak wants nothing to do with the case, David P. Meyer & Associates or Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro are currently suing him to try and stop him from pulling out. They also say Tomczak is legally liable for their fees if they lose the court case against Apple. Needless to say Tomczak isn't happy with the arrangement, and is likely to still lose thousands of dollars under the best scenario."

ClickOnThis writes "CNN reports that Voyager 2 has detected evidence of the magnetic edge of the solar system (aka the heliopause) at 76 AU (1 AU = 93 million miles), much closer to the Sun than the location of 85 AU found by Voyager 1. From the article: 'This implies that the heliosphere, a spherical bubble of charged low-energy particles created by our Sun's solar wind, is irregularly shaped, bulging in the northern hemisphere and pressed inward in the south. [...] The researchers think that the heliosphere's asymmetry might be due to a weak interstellar magnetic field pressing inward on the southern hemisphere.'"

Mark Brunelli writes to tell us that Oracle has released the newest version of the open source Oracle BerkeleyDB Java Edition. From the article: "The new release of the Java embeddable database is the third to come out in three years and the first new version to come out of Sleepycat Software since Oracle purchased the open source stalwart back in February. Rex Wang, Oracle's vice president of embedded systems and a former vice president of marketing at Sleepycat, said the latest release lets Java developers take advantage of a new Persistence application programming interface (API) that provides greater flexibility and new performance optimizations that enable applications to run faster."

alurkar writes to tell us that PostgreSQL released version 8.1.4 today in order to combat a security flaw allowing a SQL injection attack. From the article: "The vulnerability affects PostgreSQL servers exposed to untrusted input, such as input coming from Web forms, in conjunction with multi-byte encodings like (Shift-JIS (SJIS), 8-bit Unicode Transformation Format (UTF-8), 16-bit Unicode Transformation Format (UTF-16), and BIG5. In particular, Berkus says that applications using 'ad-hoc methods to "escape" strings going into the database, such as regexes, or PHP3's addslashes() and magic_quotes' are particularly unsafe. 'Since these bypass database-specific code for safe handling of strings, many such applications will need to be re-written to become secure.'"